Animal of the Week December 31, 2012 -- Robin singing in the dead of night

While we're still in the middle of the 12 days of Christmas, I thought a festive edition would be in order. And inspired by my own private music box outside my window, this week's animal is Erithacus rubecula (robin).

As I turned off an episode of Deadwood of the day (S02E11) last night, the absence of Al Swearengen's foul language revealed a robin singing its slightly mournful but impressive song somewhere outside my window, high notes, low notes, trills...at midnight. I drifted off to sleep, dreaming of the wild west, and when I woke, inexplicably at 0430 h (the words "Miss Isringhausen" on my tongue), the bird was still at it. Someone should clearly tell this bird about the dawn chorus, no?

Not a nightingale   c PierreSelim/wikimedia commons

I previously wrote about the common confusion of robins with nightingales owing to their habit of singing at night. Certainly in London on December 31, not even in Berkley Square will you hear a nightingale. But fiercely territorial robins sing all year round and intensify their song as the breeding season approaches. So important is a robin's territory that they are often the first birds to strike up song in the dawn and the last to quiet at night. And in built-up environments they will sing throughout the night. Once thought simply to be due to the effect of street lighting, research suggests that robins sing at night to avoid noise pollution. As cities wake up, birdsong becomes drowned out by the human noises, so to effectively establish their territories, robins sing at night.

Other birds are thought to alter their calls to adapt to cities, with great tits changing the pitch of theirs so that it travels better and stands out more among the milieu of city noises.

The robin's association with Christmas is actually slightly convoluted. Postmen in Victorian times were nicknamed Robin Redbreasts because their red tunics recalled the birds, people looked forward to the cards brought to them by the Robins at Christmas time, and rather than stick a picture of a postman on a christmas card, some wag stationer ran with the idea and made the robin a festive symbol.

Many Christmas cards depict groups of robins clustered together, downy feathers puffed out on a twig in a snowy garden, but such a scene would never happen, for robins are highly territorial birds. Males will fight to the death in defence of their breeding territories.

Found throughout Europe but for the far north, in the UK, the robin is the stuff of Christian folklore: one of the explanations for the red breast is that it was stained by the blood of Jesus Christ when a brown robin perched on  the cross and sang to soothe him in his time of dying, all robins henceforth bore the mark. As an evolutionary biologist, this lamarckism strikes me as unlikely, but hard to test.